The EU Approach to Safeguard Children’s Rights on Video-Sharing Platforms: Jigsaw or Maze?

Children are keen consumers of audiovisual media content. Video-sharing platforms (VSPs), such as YouTube and TikTok, offer a wealth of child-friendly or child-appropriate content but also content which—depending on the age of the child—might be considered inappropriate or potentially harmful. Moreover, such VSPs often deploy algorithmic recommender systems to personalise the content that children are exposed to (e.g., through auto-play features), leading to concerns about diversity of content or spirals of content related to, for instance, eating disorders or self-harm. This article explores the responsibilities of VSPs with respect to children that are imposed by existing, recently adopted, and proposed EU legislation. Instruments that we investigate include the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act, and the proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act. Based on a legal study of policy documents, legislation, and scholarship, this contribution investigates to what extent this legislative framework sets obligations for VSPs to safeguard children’s rights and discusses how these obligations align across different legislative instruments

Environmental variability and heavy metal concentrations from five lagoons in the Ionian Sea (Amvrakikos Gulf, W Greece)

Background: Coastal lagoons are ecosystems of major importance as they host a number of species tolerant to disturbances and they are highly productive. Therefore, these ecosystems should be protected to ensure stability and resilience. The lagoons of Amvrakikos Gulf form one of the most important lagoonal complexes in Greece. The optimal ecological status of these lagoons is crucial for the well-being of the biodiversity and the economic prosperity of the local communities. Thus, monitoring of the area is necessary to detect possible sources of disturbance and restore stability. New information: The environmental variables and heavy metals concentrations, from five lagoons of Amvrakikos Gulf were measured from seasonal samplings and compared to the findings of previous studies in the area, in order to check for possible sources of disturbance. The analysis, showed that i) the values of the abiotic parameters vary with time (season), space (lagoon) and with space over time; ii) the variability of the environmental factors and enrichment in certain elements is naturally induced and no source of contamination is detected in the lagoons

Polytraits : a database on biological traits of marine polychaetes

The study of ecosystem functioning – the role which organisms play in an ecosystem – is becoming increasingly important in marine ecological research. The functional structure of a community can be represented by a set of functional traits assigned to behavioural, reproductive and morphological characteristics. The collection of these traits from the literature is however a laborious and time-consuming process, and gaps of knowledge and restricted availability of literature are a common problem. Trait data are not yet readily being shared by research communities, and even if they are, a lack of trait data repositories and standards for data formats leads to the publication of trait information in forms which cannot be processed by computers. This paper describes Polytraits (http://polytraits.lifewatchgreece.eu), a database on biological traits of marine polychaetes (bristle worms, Polychaeta: Annelida). At present, the database contains almost 20,000 records on morphological, behavioural and reproductive characteristics of more than 1,000 marine polychaete species, all referenced by literature sources. All data can be freely accessed through the project website in different ways and formats, both human-readable and machine-readable, and have been submitted to the Encyclopedia of Life for archival and integration with trait information from other sources

Методология компьютерного моделирования процесса алмазного выглаживания

Приведены результаты компьютерного динамического моделирования процесса алмазного выглаживания методом конечных элементов в программном пакете Third Wave AdvantEdge. Установлено влияние модуля упругости обрабатываемого материала, радиуса выглаживателя, глубины и скорости выглаживания на величину напряжений в зоне обработки.The results of the computer simulation of the process of diamond smoothing by the finite element method in the software package Third Wave AdvantEdge are presented. The effect of the modulus of elasticity of the processed material, the radius of the smoother, the depth and the speed of smoothing on the value of stresses in the treatment zone is established

The effects of exotic seaweeds on native benthic assemblages: variability between trophic levels and influence of background environmental and biological conditions

Abstract Background Biological invasions are among the most severe threats to marine biodiversity. The impacts of introduced seaweeds on native macroalgal assemblages have been thoroughly reviewed. In contrast, no attempt has been made to synthesize the available information on the effects of exotic seaweeds on other trophic levels. In addition, it has not been clarified whether the effects of introduced seaweeds on native assemblages vary according to background physical and biological conditions. Methods This protocol provides details of our proposed method to carry out a systematic review aiming to identify and synthesize existing knowledge to answer the following primary questions: a) how does the impact of the presence of exotic seaweeds on native primary consumers (across trophic levels) compare in magnitude and extent to that observed on native primary producers (same trophic level)?; b) does the intensity of the effects of the presence of exotic seaweeds on native benthic ecosystems vary along a gradient of human disturbance (i.e. from urban/industrial areas to extra-urban areas to pristine areas)

Optimized R functions for analysis of ecological community data using the R virtual laboratory (RvLab)

Background: Parallel data manipulation using R has previously been addressed by members of the R community, however most of these studies produce ad hoc solutions that are not readily available to the average R user. Our targeted users, ranging from the expert ecologist/microbiologists to computational biologists, often experience difficulties in finding optimal ways to exploit the full capacity of their computational resources. In addition, improving performance of commonly used R scripts becomes increasingly difficult especially with large datasets. Furthermore, the implementations described here can be of significant interest to expert bioinformaticians or R developers. Therefore, our goals can be summarized as: (i) description of a complete methodology for the analysis of large datasets by combining capabilities of diverse R packages, (ii) presentation of their application through a virtual R laboratory (RvLab) that makes execution of complex functions and visualization of results easy and readily available to the end-user. New information: In this paper, the novelty stems from implementations of parallel methodologies which rely on the processing of data on different levels of abstraction and the availability of these processes through an integrated portal. Parallel implementation R packages, such as the pbdMPI (Programming with Big Data – Interface to MPI) package, are used to implement Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) parallelization on primitive mathematical operations, allowing for interplay with functions of the vegan package. The dplyr and RPostgreSQL R packages are further integrated offering connections to dataframe like objects (databases) as secondary storage solutions whenever memory demands exceed available RAM resources. The RvLab is running on a PC cluster, using version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31) on a x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit) platform, and offers an intuitive virtual environmet interface enabling users to perform analysis of ecological and microbial communities based on optimized vegan functions. A beta version of the RvLab is available after registration at: https://portal.lifewatchgreece.eu

LifeWatchGreece: Construction and operation of the National Research Infrastructure (ESFRI)

Editorial article explaining the background to and introducing a collection of papers describing the construction and operation phase of the Greek LifeWatch distributed centre: LifeWatchGreece

A marine biodiversity observation network for genetic monitoring of hard-bottom communities (ARMS-MBON)

Marine hard-bottom communities are undergoing severe change under the influence of multiple drivers, notably climate change, extraction of natural resources, pollution and eutrophication, habitat degradation, and invasive species. Monitoring marine biodiversity in such habitats is, however, challenging as it typically involves expensive, non-standardized, and often destructive sampling methods that limit its scalability. Differences in monitoring approaches furthermore hinders inter-comparison among monitoring programs. Here, we announce a Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) consisting of Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) with the aim to assess the status and changes in benthic fauna with genomic-based methods, notably DNA metabarcoding, in combination with image-based identifications. This article presents the results of a 30-month pilot phase in which we established an operational and geographically expansive ARMS-MBON. The network currently consists of 20 observatories distributed across European coastal waters and the polar regions, in which 134 ARMS have been deployed to date. Sampling takes place annually, either as short-term deployments during the summer or as long-term deployments starting in spring. The pilot phase was used to establish a common set of standards for field sampling, genetic analysis, data management, and legal compliance, which are presented here. We also tested the potential of ARMS for combining genetic and image-based identification methods in comparative studies of benthic diversity, as well as for detecting non-indigenous species. Results show that ARMS are suitable for monitoring hard-bottom environments as they provide genetic data that can be continuously enriched, re-analyzed, and integrated with conventional data to document benthic community composition and detect non-indigenous species. Finally, we provide guidelines to expand the network and present a sustainability plan as part of the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (www.embrc.eu).Peer reviewe